Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1738 - 6. Security Considerations

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### 6. Security Considerations

The URL scheme does not in itself pose a security threat. Users should beware that there is no general guarantee that a URL which at one time points to a given object continues to do so, and does not even at some later time point to a different object due to the movement of objects on servers.

A URL-related security threat is that it is sometimes possible to construct a URL such that an attempt to perform a harmless idempotent operation such as the retrieval of the object will in fact cause a possibly damaging remote operation to occur. The unsafe URL is typically constructed by specifying a port number other than that reserved for the network protocol in question. The client unwittingly contacts a server which is in fact running a different protocol. The content of the URL contains instructions which when interpreted according to this other protocol cause an unexpected operation. An example has been the use of gopher URLs to cause a rude message to be sent via a SMTP server. Caution should be used when using any URL which specifies a port number other than the default for the protocol, especially when it is a number within the reserved space.

Care should be taken when URLs contain embedded encoded delimiters for a given protocol (for example, CR and LF characters for telnet protocols) that these are not unencoded before transmission. This would violate the protocol but could be used to simulate an extra operation or parameter, again causing an unexpected and possible harmful remote operation to be performed. The use of URLs containing passwords that should be secret is clearly unwise.

Next: 7. Acknowledgements

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1738 - 6. Security Considerations